Posted on: Sunday, January 16, 2005
COMMENTARY
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| • | Jerry Burris: 2005 Legislature must look beyond its own concerns |
By E.D. Hirsch Jr.
Concern over Hawai'i students' low reading scores is justified.
Reading comprehension reflects a person's listening comprehension and ability to learn and to participate in a fast-changing world. A student's reading score in an early grade predicts that student's later ability to become a productive and autonomous adult. A student's reading score in second grade currently predicts on average that student's scores in grade 11. And a student's reading score in grade 11 predicts that student's whole economic future.
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser An epoch-making (though not very expensive) education bill is being offered to the Hawai'i Legislature. It authorizes the creation of a language-arts program designed to overcome the most intractable problem in American education — low reading-comprehension scores. The bill would give Hawai'i teachers and schools a choice: whether to persist in current approaches, or to take a divergent, scientifically-grounded approach to raising students' reading comprehension by the systematic enlargement of students' general knowledge.
If the bill passes and the program is used, we can expect a new era in our nation's education, one in which Hawai'i will have led the way.
Someone who is curious about why current approaches to teaching reading comprehension have not been working should take a look at programs that are currently being handed to teachers. They will find that teachers are compelled to offer their students a fare of trivial, helter-skelter readings from which students can learn nothing in a sustained way. The emphasis of these programs is on abstract skills, such as "finding the main idea" or "critical thinking." Oddly enough, these programs have not been singled out in the blame game for low reading scores. Rather, the blame has been unfairly attached to our dedicated teachers, who have been saddled with these programs.
Blame for the low scores is attached also to the hapless students themselves because of their "disadvantaged" condition. But we are all educationally disadvantaged at birth. The noble aim of early education as conceived by Jefferson and other founders of our democratic public schooling was to compensate for accidents of birth.
These founding thinkers held that our schools should be designed expressly to overcome home disadvantages. We know that this can be successfully done because it has been done, especially in schools where a sustained and coherent approach to teaching general knowledge informs the curriculum. This is the case in Core Knowledge schools, and it is also the case in entire school systems in other countries that greatly outperform us in reading.
The bill offers an inducement to publishers to make an early-reading program whose content is coherent and sustained, integrated with the Hawai'i curriculum as a whole. The emphasis is to be on the student's gradual accumulation of the knowledge needed to be a good reader and a participating, contributing citizen. What a refreshing and hopeful idea!
E.D. Hirsch Jr. is chairman of the nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation. He also is a professor emeritus of the University of Virginia and author of "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know." He wrote this article for The Advertiser.
Reading scores are thus portentous for Hawai'i's future prosperity. And the low average reading scores across the nation are troubling omens for the future prosperity of our whole nation.
State lawmakers at work. This year, can they get past their own interests to do the peoples' work?
